On the economic impact of droughts in central Europe: the decade from 1531 to 1540 from the Polish perspective

Abstract

Abstract. The period from around 1450 to 1550 in Europe is extremely interesting from the perspective of research on extreme weather events. It was a period of events that strongly influenced the societies and economies of the Old Continent. So far, the literature has been more focused on western and northern Europe. Concerning the region of central Europe, the greatest attention was paid to the Czech Republic or Hungary. This article revolves around the Polish lands, which experienced their greatest economic boom in the 16th century. We consider whether and how the droughts of the decade from 1531 to 1540 might have affected the country's economic development. We analyse a number of written sources which are the product of the treasury apparatus of the time (tax registers, data from water customs, tax exemptions, inventories of land estates etc.), but also information on fluctuations in product prices in the most important cities in this part of Europe. The work not only provides a detailed account of economic data, but also attempts to reflect on the relevance of linking information on fires in urban centres in the period characterized by weather extremes.

Famines in medieval and early modern Europe—Connecting climate and society

“…The clear association in Central Europe, and to a lesser extent the British Isles, between severe food crises and clusters of wet autumns and winters, cold springs, and excessively wet and often cold summers, has been repeatedly highlighted in modern scholarship (Baek et al, 2020; Camenisch, 2015b, 2015a; Campbell, 2016; Hoffmann, 2014; Pfister, 2005, 2007; Pfister & Wanner, 2021; Pribyl, 2017). At the same time, the geographically heterogeneous impact of droughts on food production has been demonstrated to be a minor cause of severe food shortage across regions in Central Europe (Brázdil et al, 2019; Wetter et al, 2014; Związek et al, 2022). In Mediterranean Europe, on the other hand, it was mainly spring droughts and extremely cold winters that posed threats to food production and, consequently, to food security (Barriendos, 2005; Franklin‐Lyons, 2022; Llopis et al, 2020; Moreda, 2017; Moreno et al, 2020; Simpson, 1996; Xoplaki et al, 2018).…”

Climatic signatures in early modern European grain harvest yields

“…Years and decades with cold springs, and excessively wet summers, were associated with unfavourable conditions for crop growth north of the Mediterranean region (Camenisch, 2015;White et al, 2018;Pfister and Wanner, 2021). Droughts could have severe negative impacts on grain harvest yields too (Esper et al, 2017;Brázdil et al, 2019Brázdil et al, , 2020Skoglund, 2022;Zwi ązek et al, 2022), although their agricultural impacts were geographically heterogeneous (Wetter et al, 2014;Brázdil et al, 2019) as is still the case in Europe today (Beillouin et al, 2020). In general, droughts are more spatially restricted than temperature anomalies in Europe (Büntgen et al, 2010;Cook et al, 2015;Ljungqvist et al, 2019), and they are less likely than temperature anomalies to occur for consecutive years (Bunde et al, 2013;Franke et al, 2013;Esper et al, 2017).…”